Something
by Authors Tune
Summary: (Early Season 9, Calzona Oneshot) There's a point, where laughter becomes the only option. Where life seems so ludicrous, fantasy like, that it couldn't possibility be real. Where the next thing that comes hurtling towards you, may as well be a meteor, because anything else would pale in comparison.


**AN: **So, I wasn't going to particularly write something after these first two episodes. I've been more than content reading all the different versions and ideas, different fics that have been popping up. Having a blast really, loving all the new posts. :-) But then I started jotting a few things down while I was wide awake last night and then it was long enough to maybe post, so I thought why not. I do love the opportunity to write some more angst. *grin*

* * *

**Something – Part 1/1**

_There's a point, where laughter becomes the only option. Where life seems so ludicrous, fantasy like, that it couldn't possibility be real. Where the next thing that comes hurtling towards you, may as well be a meteor, because anything else would pale in comparison. So you laugh; an insanely, hysterical guttural cackle. Because the alternative is unimaginable, and it's far beyond just sinking into a miserable void of depression. It would mean completely disintegrating._

_It would mean disappearing forever._

* * *

To an outsider, they certainly would have appeared the image of complete dysfunction. Arizona, curled on her side, buried beneath the bed covers, sobs muffled only by the pillows she had propped herself up with hours earlier. And Callie, slumped over the kitchen counter, forehead pressed into her folded arms and loudly crying. Sofia even mimicked their acopia, intermittently tearfully pleading for Mama and Mammi from the confines of her playpen.

Not one of them received the comfort they desired, loving arms wrapped around trembling shoulders and wet cheeks wiped dry. Just endless streams of deprecating thoughts and the unsaid, that couldn't be left silent.

Once the courage was found.

Almost an hour later and the only change was Sofia, sound asleep in the corner of the makeshift cot, thumb self soothing between dry lips. Callie raised her head, suddenly aware that she hadn't heard from her daughter, though her concept of time was completely absent. She breathed a noticeable sigh of relief, rubbing at her reddened eyes and pale, blotchy cheeks. Standing, she walked past Sofia, stopping momentarily to drape a cotton throw from the sofa over her tiny body.

Then, without hesitation, she made her way to the room she shared with Arizona. Once shared; still did. She wasn't so sure any more, but she did know, that if she hesitated, if she thought about her options, then the outcome might not be worth considering. The answers weren't something she was willing to explore; they were most likely inconceivable. She was closer to walking out the apartment door, rather than into their room, than she was willing to acknowledge. It wouldn't be forever, in fact it would probably only be for a few moments, an hour maybe. But walking away from Arizona was a mistake she had made before.

Without conscious awareness, she found herself crouching in front of Arizona and falling to her knees, needing open palms on the floor to stop herself from dissolving prematurely. Arizona, without even a weak verbal acknowledgement, tracked Callie. Her blue eyes were wide, almost fearful. And the tears gathered once more as she wondered if she had finally pushed too hard.

Callie cleared her throat, yet the words still tumbled out dryly, syllables broken like the air in the room. "I'm angry too," she articulated, distinctly noticing Arizona's molars clench. "Because you asked me to make a promise, that you had no right to ask me."

"You don't think that I know that?" Arizona bit back cruelly, venomous.

"Don't punish me, Arizona, for something that neither you, nor I; or the best surgeon in the world, could have honestly promised."

"I didn't ask you as my surgeon. I asked you, as my _wife_."

A chocked cry escaped Callie's lips, everything about her raw and unfiltered. "And that wasn't fair."

"Yes Calliope, fair is a concept that I understand well."

"Life isn't fair. So much about the world isn't fair; your world, our world. Life in general, you know that."

"So what? I'm being unreasonable? I should be _happy,_ grateful?" The remote control on the edge of her pillow met the wall behind Callie's back, batteries tumbled to the floor and plastic splintered.

Wincing, Callie tucked her chin closer to her chest. "No," she muttered, falling back to her sit heavily on her heals. "I'm telling you, that you had no right to ask me to do something you knew was impossible."

"You should have said no; you should have had the guts to look me in the eye and tell me what I wasn't…what I couldn't face. You, you should have been the one to do that." Arizona waved her index finger in the air, tensed muscles and taut tendons, all pointing directly at Callie's face.

"How? How did you expect me to do that?"

"It was your job! You were the one I trusted, no one else. No one else." And there was more honesty in that statement than Callie had heard in weeks.

Callie shook her head in disbelief, face crumbling. "You were falling apart in my arms; you were talking about Sofia as if she was someone, something that you would never touch again. I was scared Arizona, I was scared that if I didn't hold on to you somehow, in any way I could, that you were done. There was this thought and I still have it, every time I leave you alone, that I'll come back and find your body. And that's it. Just your body. Do you have any idea what that is like?"

Blank eyes stared back at her, finger curling in the air and hand trembling slightly. "So it's my fault?" Arizona tossed back, grasping at anything to keep the blame externalised, where it was so much easier to deal with.

"You left me to choose your life, over your leg. You should have made that choice, you should have tried at least, or we should have made it together. Did you do it so that you could spend our life screaming at me, hating me? Does that make this all better for you, Arizona?"

She shook her head. "No, no…I don't know. This isn't easier, nothing about this is better; do you really think that this is what I wanted?"

"Do you think this is what I wanted? All I wanted was for you to live."

"Well this wasn't what I wanted!" Arizona spat back angrily, as if there wasn't a person in the world that knew how much she despised the hand she had been dealt.

"You were going to lose your leg!" Callie said loudly, tilting her head back and growling at the ceiling. "It didn't matter what I did, or anyone else did. You lost your leg when it took four days to find you, not because I did or didn't treat the infection aggressively enough. Blame the pilot, blame the freakin' weather or the aircraft manufacturers. Not me, the person who loves you more than anything in the world and who made the clear mistake of doing anything to not lose you."

"I can't!" Arizona half screamed, half sobbed back at her as she grappled with the tangled blond hair at her scalp. And she couldn't, because the only person left to blame was herself. For being so stubborn, so arrogant, that she crucified her protégé and abandoned her family to defiantly get on a plane to do a surgery she was never meant to do. She hated herself more than she hated Karev; more than she hated Callie; more than she hated every able bodied, smiling person she saw when she looked out the window. Because she was so cowardly, the way she targeted Alex in an instance of displaced grief. When the lines became blurred and the potential losses too great; so ironic, that she lost it all anyway, and then some. "I am, so ashamed of who I am. Who I've become," she gasped out, the base of her palm beating almost aggressively against her own temples, hair stretching and pulling where it was gripped around her fingers.

"Arizona," Callie whispered, body tensing mid movement compelled to reach for the dissolving shell in front of her. She was completely torn between the anguish she was witnessing and that she was tormented by.

"You shouldn't have…God Callie, you shouldn't have done it, and don't you understand? I wasn't…" she murmured, trailing off. Without the anger, she was so defeated and her truth was even harder to articulate. With the hatred came a part of her that didn't care about the consequences of her words, her attitudes; if she pushed someone away than she achieved her goal. If she pushed Callie away, then maybe she wasn't failing so dramatically.

But then Callie emanated love and understanding; even hurt. It oozed from her, like it always had really, even in their darkest days, hours, moments. And her honesty, the secrets Arizona kept inside, couldn't break anyone else if they never left her lips.

Just her.

"I wish I had a choice," Callie whispered, shoulders shuddering as a tumble of tears dripped to her thighs. "Every day I wish I could have saved it, Arizona. Saved _it,_ and your life. But I couldn't; no one could."

Arizona allows the words to linger in the air, though Callie had misinterpreted her half finished sentence. How could she possibly say that in silence of their apartment, in the moments of her greatest indignity, she honestly believed the world would be a better place if Callie hadn't saved her life.

How do you tell the woman you love, that you're so irreparably broken? Shattered beyond comprehension, in a place where death is enviable.

But how to do you scramble out of the depths of hell, if no one knows you're there?

"Callie?" The silence between them lingered long and Callie jumped at the scratched enunciation of her name. Goosebumps covered her arms, exposed to the cool, evening air. She looked up at Arizona, who was working hard at containing her trembling lower lip.

"It's okay," Callie whispered, "I've pushed you enough today. I'm sorry." She was her own form of shattered, and exhaustion stole the fight as it so often did, in the seconds when it was needed most.

"No," Arizona forcibly said, and her voice reverberated against the walls. She squinted her eyes, silently begging for some skerrick of strength. "I don't want to feel like this."

Still, her initial words weren't enough as Callie just stared back, confused and drawing her own conclusions. Presuming that Arizona was trying to assure her that she didn't want to blame her for the amputation of her poisoned limb. Callie couldn't have been more wrong. "I know you don't, I know…I understand that you need to blame someone. I can take it, Arizona. For a while longer." Callie's voice was soft and oozing hurt, as if she was trying anything to avoid Arizona making a decision to send her away.

Arizona shook her head and guilt mixed fluidly with the shame that coursed through her veins. She had every right to be angry, to be endlessly upset and to mourn the loss of Nick and her leg, and everything in between. The career that was suddenly stagnated and the big moments she was missing in the life, of one very special little girl. To find peace with the constant, repetitive thought that she wasn't meant to be on that plane, that she should never have even stepped foot on that aircraft. She held a hand out so that it dangled off the side of the bed, forearm exposed from underneath the blankets. Callie narrowed her forehead in confusion, the action foreign after all this time. "Please?" Arizona asked timidly and her fingers were bolt tight as soon as Callie's palm slipped into her grasp. She tugged Callie closer to the bed and tried to swallow the undeniable need to metaphorically run. Still, the consideration sickened her, the mere mention of the word.

"I'm here," Callie murmured, and she had little else to offer than her presence. She hovered her spare hand above Arizona's side, not even remotely willing to place it on her hip as she would have done a thousand times before their life spun on a tumultuous axis.

"I'm somewhere," Arizona began quietly, eyes focussed on the wall to the side of Callie. "Somewhere where I can't get out. I don't want to be here, in this place," she added, tapping at her chest with a closed fist. "And I don't think I can move without you, I've tried to do it by myself but I can't. And I'm hurting you; Sofia."

"You have to let me…" Callie trailed off; though she wasn't even sure Arizona heard her words.

"I don't want to die," Arizona continued, though tears swelled in her eyes as she termed the phrase. Callie's breath caught in her throat as she waited, petrified at what her wife was evidently about to disclose. "I know that I have a lot to live for, and to fight for. And there's moments where I see that; but then there's days where I don't." She shuddered and a rush of salty water tracked over the bridge of her nose and sideways down her cheek and temple. "And those days scare me, they scare me a lot. Because it makes me think that you shouldn't have saved me." Callie's fingers returned the desperate grasp that Arizona had, and she brought her other hand to intensify the hold. "And I know, I know how selfish that is. And no one knows how awful I feel because I know, they would trade with me in an instant. Mark and Lexie, what they wouldn't give for a second chance."

"It's okay, it's okay Arizona."

She gasped in response, drawing her eyes to flitter with Callie's intense eye contact. "What?" she asked, shaking her head. "You don't understand, I'm angry with you because you made me live. To live a life I'm not sure I'm strong enough for."

"I know," Callie murmured, nodding. She dipped her head bravely and pressed a lingering kiss to Arizona's knuckles, white with crimson creases. There were questions she wanted to ask and probably needed to. Though like Arizona, she wondered briefly if she was resilient enough to hear the answers. "I can't imagine how incredibly, incredibly horrific that feels. And I don't really know how to help."

"You don't hate me?"

"Hate you? What?"

Arizona hiccupped a cry. "For being this ungrateful…" she trailed off, lost for words.

"No," Callie responded immediately, not a moment or resemblance of hesitation. "You're telling me how bad your hurting, Arizona. And I hear you, I am listening and I don't know what to do or how to help. But I'm listening and I'm not going, I'm staying right here."

"Don't let me," Arizona gasped, struggling with contorted facial muscles to tenuously hold on to some control, "want to die. Don't stop trying, and I know I don't deserve it, your effort. But please." She couldn't quite get the phrases to flow together coherently, but she knew, they both knew, that the elephant in the room had been acknowledged at least.

Crawling up to her feet, Callie kept a grasp of Arizona's hand, pulling her upper body off the bed. She awkwardly climbed on to the bed; discarding the superfluous pillows to the floor as Arizona weakened, chin falling to her chest and messy blond tangles shadowing her face. Legs either side of her wife, Callie enveloped her, blinking away the unfamiliar sensation of nothingness against her leg calf. It was far easier to comprehend than the emptiness in her arms. "I'll do whatever it takes, anything," Callie hushed into Arizona's ear, lips falling to the nape of her neck. She wanted to say that she _promised_, but perhaps that was a word that neither of them needed to hear. A word, a concept that Arizona retreated to in her moments of abandonment; when all of her resources failed and she was left with just the insecurities she had carried since childhood. When forever was a conceivable concept.

"Please," Arizona repeated, turning in Callie's arms and conforming to her chest. Her leg involuntarily moved, sliding over Callie's thigh; the base of her stump coming to rest just over Callie's knee.

"I won't Arizona," she murmured, "I won't give up on you." She gamely trailed her hand down Arizona's spine and over the curve of her hip, until her open palm rested where a strong hamstring once existed. Just wasted, loose skin now. Her action earned a fresh round of cries, though her arm was gripped rather than thrust away.

Arizona may not have gotten out of bed, but at least Callie had found her way in.

* * *

The bedroom door opening brought Callie's gaze tumbling away from Sofia in her highchair, cereal spoon crashing back to the plastic bowl. "Mama!" Sofia exclaimed first, small palm gripping the spoon Callie had discarded. "Mmmm, oats," she added, as if not even seeing the crutches, pinned jeans or her mother's strained expression. As if the past weeks, months hadn't even happened.

Callie slowly stood, hands out in front of her hesitantly. "Arizona," she whispered, eyes wide.

She earned a nod in response; wet blond curls tucked behind her ear and secured with a small, clear elastic. "I umm, I have the psych at ten and physio at twelve." She swayed with the crutches, stepping forward towards the dining room table. Her arms already ached with the effort of showering and dressing, and the dozen hops that it took to exit their bedroom.

Callie smiled though she couldn't quite get Arizona to emulate it. "I'll get you some breakfast," Callie said, grateful when the hand she placed on Arizona's back wasn't angrily swatted away. She lingered for a moment, gripping Arizona's bicep and guiding her into a chair before resting the crutches against the end of the table. "Any requests?"

"I think Sofia's oatmeal looks good," Arizona answered, tapping her fingers on the table and crawling them towards Sofia. Sofia reached out and smacked them, giggling.

"Sure," Callie answered, voice strained as she stopped with the fridge door open, back to Arizona. Tears burned at her eyes, an undeniable sense of relief though she knew in reality, what she was witnessing was only a tentative baby step. Still, it felt bigger than that.

"I suppose you have surgeries booked in today?" Arizona asked, helplessly looking for a washcloth as Sofia went about trying to coordinate the spoon with her mouth.

Callie nodded. "Yeah, I guess a few. They can be pushed though, if you want me to come with you."

"Do you think that would be okay?" Callie placed a bowl and some milk in the microwave, drawing in a deep breath. It was hard to see her wife, once so confident and full of life, suddenly so frightened.

"Of course, not a problem at all. I was so hoping you would want me to come along." Yet another invisible consequence of this entire tragedy; and she wasn't the only one. The only one to have to watch helplessly as the one she loved hurt and struggled more than she ever thought was possible. Owen too; him and Cristina and their invisible brokenness.

"Sofia?" Sofia asked of her Mama, hand tapping to her chest as she asked if she was included in this secret outing.

"No Miss Sofia, day care for you today," Callie answered from the kitchen, waiting patiently for the microwave to finish. "I think it's paint day today, you want to do some painting for Mama?"

Sofa nodded eagerly. "Paint picture, park. Kay? Green Mama, paint green."

Arizona observed quietly, lower body hidden beneath the table; it could have been any morning from the last six months, listening to Sofia as she learnt different words and tried to string them together into tiny sentences. "Yes, you paint me a pretty picture and I will put it on the fridge when you come home." And in that brief, subconscious sentence, she provided hope that she would be out of bed when Sofia got home. That she would be in the lounge, or the kitchen, watching television maybe or sitting on her laptop.

Sofia clapped in response and repeated Arizona. "Fridge, picture."

"Here you go," Callie interrupted, placing a small bowl of oatmeal in front of Arizona, topped with cut up banana and brown sugar.

"Thank you," Arizona murmured, taking a few small bites.

"'Nana," Sofia said after a few moments, pointing at Arizona's banana and opening her mouth wide, waiting expectantly until Arizona spooned a piece in. "Mmmm, yum."

"Yummy banana," Callie agreed, squeezing Arizona's neck before sliding into a seat next to her. Arizona quietly ate a small amount, distractedly staring into the bowl and pushing the cereal around with her spoon. "Nervous?" Callie asked after a few minutes of observing.

Arizona nodded her reply. "Yeah," she said softly, expression forlorn though placid.

"I'm proud of you," Callie said gently, picking up another slice of fruit with her fingertips and giving it to Sofia, it was effective at keeping her quiet for a few moments longer. Arizona raised her eyebrows and glanced at Callie, almost in disbelief. "I really am."

"I don't know how I'm going to go."

Shrugging, Callie smiled. "It doesn't matter, it's starting. So that's good and this," she added, winking at Sofia, "this is good."

"A start," Arizona confirmed, and it was. It didn't feel significant and she didn't feel particularly different to what she had the day before, or the day before that. But she wasn't in her bed, and that was something.

Something more than nothing.

* * *

_Fin._


End file.
